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Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together
- freetonik 10mo agoLooks like Unity code. Not sure if it’s Visual Studio or VS Code, but yeah, it was baffling to me how weirdly bad C# support in either IDE is. Maybe something wrong with my setup, but autocompletions indeed suck (in addition to just wrong picks, editors often would suggest a symbol that doesn’t make sense from the typing perspective, as if there aren’t any language servers or intellisense or whatever). VS code would also eat up the curly brace at the end of a class declaration when auto-generating a method skeleton. I gave up and installed Rider. So far so good.
- PacificSpecific 10mo agoThey say it's vscode in the article. I can't say I've seen anything that egregious happen with unity in visual studio. It's stuff like this though that keeps me from using vscode for code editing (I use it for markdown and JSON file editing only). I guess I don't know what I'm missing but it's never been a smooth experience for me. If I'm on Windows I tend to stick with visual studio. Maybe I should consider rider...
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoMicrosoft VS peaked for me in 2013 to 2017 when they decoupled a bunch of things, specifically .NET
- CharlieDigital 10mo ago.NET feels better than ever right now. C# native type unions maybe next year will be a big highlight.
- jimbo808 10mo agoI wonder if 30% of their code being written by AI has anything to do with it
- stefan_ 10mo ago30% of code written by AI, but 100% of tools must be enshittified with the terrible and behind Microsoft Copilot even if it means you will blow up the goodwill for VS Code in a matter of months
- n8cpdx 10mo agoNot a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets? The project is open source and invites feedback in the form of issues, although sadly their issue report page is a bit of a cesspool - will really make you lose faith in humanity. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues I think maybe vibe coders got to it and don’t realize that there are certain requirements to create useful feedback? Or maybe VS Code linking from the help menu is a bad idea. This blog post is a step above the “doesn’t work is garbage” issues filed in GitHub, but only just one. What did the author try to fix? When did it stop working? What kind of projects? What extensions are installed? Aside: in the spirit of Christmas cheer, I’ll share this fun meme, completely (un)related to the topic at hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to_github_and_i_have_lots_to_say/ https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
- lloydatkinson 10mo ago> Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets? Which is overwhelmingly the VS Code experience for any language. Everything feels shaky. I've had to report a bunch of irritating issues like the post for TypeScript - never fixed or resolved. I have never needed to report issues like this for C# in Visual Studio, and when I have tried C# in VS Code the experience makes me wonder if it's a bad joke.
- OptionOfT 10mo agoReminds me of Windows Search. It's been botched since they added ads to the Start Menu. Pretty soon VSCode will show you intellisense ads in the list of code completions.
- Someone1234 10mo agoWindows Search requires a DNS lookup, and HTTP request to start your search, as a direct result if either one of those is slow the whole UI lags and hangs. It hasn't ever been fixed in Windows 11. Also, there is a RegX way of disabling "bing" for-real in the search but they released an update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).
- OptionOfT 10mo agoI have resorted to installing my laptop with Ireland / English & later switching the region to US / English. That way it's considered part of the European Economic Area. Which allows me to disable web search in start, disable widgets, etc.
- WackyFighter 10mo agoI use this script here and it will remove the stupid bing search feature. https://github.com/musman96/win11debloat https://github.com/musman96/win11debloat
- naikrovek 10mo ago> Windows Search requires a DNS lookup WHY? Why? Why. I’m seriously asking. Who thought that was a good idea? Who?! FIRE THEM. NO USER ever in the history of Windows users ever said: “I want to search the contents of my computer, but windows search is too fast; can you please make windows search extremely slow, make it omit things that I know exist, and also make it search the internet? Also, I want you to index my laptop while it is sleeping in my bag, making my bag very hot, and using up all my battery trying to cool down so that I have no battery left when I open up the laptop.” No one has ever asked for that, but we have it, we’ve had it for a long damn time.
- meander_water 10mo agoThis is actually bearable compared to the new terminal suggestions in vscode. Not only does it autosuggest bizzare completions for commands, it breaks shell completions. So when I tab a file path, it shoves the absolute path into the partially typed path making it unusable.
- tsujamin 10mo agoI thought I was going crazy, but it started feeling materially worse sometime in last few weeks.
- matltc 10mo agoNope, not crazy. Pretty much solely used it for years but got a lazyvim* setup last week Still has excellent integrated debugging and is more familiar than nvim, but it has really started to get in its own way the past couple minor versions *Not "lazy I'm" (though perhaps I am for letting that slide)
- pests 10mo agoafter two decades my muscle memory in the terminal is pretty important. that + with keyboard shortcuts ive had multiple jobs ask me to "slow down" when doing screenshares as everything moves so fast.
- causal 10mo agoYeah for anyone else (especially Mac and Linux users) who recently had this frustration thrust upon you: Go into VSCode settings and search for terminal integration > uncheck.
- wanhandle 10mo agoThe specific setting is `terminal.integrated.suggest.enabled`.
- smj-edison 10mo agoOhh, that's what has been happening when I've had tab completion fail recently! Thanks for mentioning it...
- mfro 10mo agoPretty sure you’re supposed to press return in order to accept a dropdown suggestion. Tab is for accepting the AI code completion. I disabled completions.
- Someone1234 10mo agoPretty sure they hijacked a key most developers had a muscle memory of using since Visual Basic 6 to pump their AI usage metrics, and then invented a workaround that requires re-learning their tool.
- mfro 10mo agoFair point.
- diath 10mo agoIt's because Tab accepts copilot suggestion, you have to press Enter instead to accept the language server suggestion.
- Someone1234 10mo agoYes, and what a mess it has been. Intellisense + Intellicode + Roslynator (extension) combined were really the height of productivity in Visual Studio. Now they've driven a steam-roller over all of that, forced CoPilot down our throats. I LIKE CoPilot's "chat" interface, and agents are fine too (although Claude in VS Code is tons better), but CoPilot auto-complete is negative value and shouldn't be used.
- mcv 10mo agoI hate the time unpredictability of it. Intellij also has AI completion suggestions, and sometimes they're really useful. But sometimes when I expect them, they don't come. Or they briefly flash and then disappear. What would be nice is if you could ask for a suggestion with one key, so it's there when I want it, and not when I don't. That would put me in control. Instead I feel subjected to these completely random whims of the AI.
- stevage 10mo agoHuh I'm the opposite. I find the copilot chat slow and low value compared to ChatGPT. But I use the tab autocomplete a lot. Otoh I disabled all the intellisense stuff so I don't have the issues described in TFA: tab is always copilot autocomplete for whatever it shows in grey.
- hypercube33 10mo agoSame. copilot auto complete with powershell seems better than cursors given by how often I use each
- n8cpdx 10mo agoDo people know you can turn copilot off?
- Someone1234 10mo agoThis is a company that cannot get "basic file search" working on their OS for 30+ years, I'm hardly holding my breath as they double-down on overcomplexity with even more overcomplexity. Shout-out to FileLocator Pro as an aside.
- pcunite 10mo agoyep, and FileSearchEX
- croes 10mo agoOr the start menu search
- ashvardanian 10mo agoNot a fan of Windows either, but playing devil’s advocate here: Apple’s Finder has steadily gotten worse over the last ~16 years, at least in my experience. It increasingly struggles with basic functionality. There seems to be a pattern where higher market cap correlates with worse ~~tech~~ fundamentals.
- Aeglaecia 10mo agowhy would a company be incentivized to improve the user experience in ways that aren't profitable ? especially after watching the number one tech company literally worsen UX to increase profitability
- piskov 10mo agoJetbrains Rider is very nice. Especially with ideavim plugin. And pretty fast these fast these days.
- yoyohello13 10mo agoI don’t know what it is but I think commpletion across editors has gotten so much worse. Even PyCharm now routinely completes some hallucinated method or library. Even with AI completions off I feel like it still somehow got dumber since 2023.
- Yossarrian22 10mo agoNobody is dogfooding the non-AI versions of autocomplete anymore is my best guess
- itissid 10mo agoThere was a time when if you edited documentation in vscode and had copilot on it would complete internal user and project names when it encountered a path on some.random LLM project we were building. I could find people and their projects by just googling the username and contextual keywords. We all had a lot of laughs with tab auto complete and wondered in anticipation what ridiculous stuff it threw up next.
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoDitch VSCode, switch to Zed.
- shadester88 10mo agoI didnt think I would ever switch from vscode but Zed is very nice and my daily driver now.
- citbl 10mo agoThere are still plenty of things that VSCode does and Zed doesn't. E.g. Dart debugging. Also there is the VC money problem with Zed, at some point, that money will want returns on every dollar spent.
- koakuma-chan 10mo ago1. Use println 2. That's fine, they'll just build some cloud feature
- vkou 10mo ago> 1. Use println Printf debugging is a usability and productivity disaster compared to an actual debugger.
- speedgoose 10mo agoIt depends, it can be useful to easily debug some flows. It’s also sometimes better for interactive applications where pausing the execution would break the interface. A developer should use both.
- vkou 10mo agoThey should, but if given the option to only exclusively use one or the other, I would never in a million years pick it. Because I have put in a tiny bit of effort into understanding how to use a debugger. Most of them provide you with a feature list that's a strict superset of printf, because they let you set conditional non-blocking breakpoints that can have side effects. Which is perfect for the situation you've described - logging state without blocking. Then you can block and look through that state + any additional relevant info.
- locusofself 10mo agoDon't get me started on powershell! For one, it's the right arrow key for complete for most things (but tab for others). But by FAR the worst thing is that often times you'll type a command and try to tab/arrow complete an argument, and the module/dll or whatever is not loaded into memory, and so theres some blocking operation and loads the module which takes 10+ seconds. This happens to me almost every day. I do love powershell otherwise though, after 20+ years in bash, there is actually some things to like about it.
- RajT88 10mo agoI have a deep and abiding love of Powershell but you are spot on. It is amazing until you run into one of these insane behaviors that somehow nobody ever fixed. (Some are actually fixed finally in 7.x - like issues with filenames with grave characters in them)
- naikrovek 10mo agoI like PowerShell too, but in what universe other than ours (clearly the worst one) is it even possible for loading a module to take more time than the blink of an eye? Microsoft should find it embarrassing how long it takes powershell to load a module. Pushing <tab> to autocomplete a cmdlet name should never take more than maybe 100 milliseconds.
- estetlinus 10mo agoReminds of why I sold my Windows. One day I just had enough of things breaking in all the colors of the rainbow. For every problem I have on my macOS, some poor Windows user have experienced 50 non-Googleable errors. I do like Powershell though.
- Timwi 10mo agoLoading times surely is not a problem unique to Powershell. The more complex and advanced a software gets, the more it takes to load data into RAM that appears to the user redundant. This is the most noticable with startup times. My favorite software (Firefox) has this solved; it opens up in reasonable amounts of time, even if it takes a moment after to show the first website. My second favorite software (Inkscape), meanwhile, takes so long just to show the main UI that the developers didn't think anything of adding a splash screen: an overt acknowledgement that you're keeping the user waiting. I, too, wish that everything were more lean and snappy, but clearly this is still an unsolved problem.
- luxuryballs 10mo agoVisual Studio has been doing wacky stuff to me like this when I am trying to start a LINQ statement and type a letter to be the lambda variable like Select(f => … but when I hit ‘f’ it just autocompletes some random model from some .NET api that starts with F that I then have to delete because why would I want FileStreamCombulator right now I’m trying to start a lambda??? and don’t remember it doing this in the past.
- tiotempestade 10mo agoWhy do people still spend time worrying about M$ stuff…
- esseph 10mo agoBecause it runs probably as high as 95% of enterprise environments (desktop / laptop / office / exchange / active directory)
- yoyohello13 10mo agoMicrosoft stuff is universally dogshit. The amount of time/money we burn on making Azure work as it’s supposed to is insane. I will never willingly give Microsoft money.
- Anamon 10mo agoIf you hate Azure, wait until you try AWS. (I hate(d) Azure, and then I was forced to try AWS.)
- godelski 10mo agoWorrying? Because it's forced upon some of us. Bigger question is how they still exist while trying as hard as they can to kill themselves. Or why they're even trying to do that in the first place
- thecrumb 10mo agoI switched from Sublime to VSCode years ago and have been fairly happy but the recent AI onslaught in VSCode is making me look at other editors.
- jspann 10mo ago> Ivan was born at a very young age, this has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move. Lol
- Cupprum 10mo agoI think it originates from The Restarurant at the end of the Universe: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_125092 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_125092
- PieUser 10mo agoIs there a GitHub issue for this?
- qingcharles 10mo agoI dunno about GitHub, but the devs are fairly responsive on the Microsoft forum (which is awful and requires MS login) and you can just Tweet-shame them into fixing stuff if you don't want to go through the proper channels ;)
- reactordev 10mo agoC# DevKit has been doing this for the last month or so I’ve noticed. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s algebra. I know VSCode replaced their autocomplete with copilot but whaaaat?
- shinymark 10mo agoChange to real Visual Studio for C#. Visual Studio Code is complete garbage in comparison.
- grugagag 10mo agoVisual Studio started to enshitify as well
- novaleaf 10mo agodunno if you tried VS2026 C#, but it's worse. I have no extensions (besides the default Copilot) and it's a never ending battle of just trying to get the normal intellisense to show up. What's worst is that the copilot autocomplete suggestions fill in made up methods/properties. Why can't it look at intellisense to get the real ones?
- qingcharles 10mo agoI've switched everything except WinForms to VS Code because Visual Studio is becoming a second rate citizen. Where are the first party extensions for Claude Code or Codex? Why is GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio always weeks behind the VS Code version?
- latentsea 10mo ago*Rider
- ziml77 10mo agoI really hate that by default all of these tools perform completion with tab. It makes it very difficult to add indentation. It's not a problem with traditional autocomplete because you either need to already have a character typed before the cursor, or to have manually summoned the completions. But these AI autocompletes will try to generate code on completely empty lines, so you think you're pressing tab to get an indent and instead end up with code you did not want.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoAnother thing I'd like the team to fix, is to ignore autocomplete for ., -> and other operators in comments, or ignore all autocomplete in comments. VSCode does have the option, but at least for my C code, it only works for // comments, not /* */ ones.
- Razengan 10mo agoSomeone needs to bring back the old "Windows [Aero] Task Force" website from back in the Vista/XP days that listed every minor UI/UX annoyance in Windows. And Jobs knows we need something like that for macOS and iOS too now.
- n8cpdx 10mo agoLink to context if there’s interest, there was a macOS equivalent back in the day: https://istartedsomething.com/20080811/launching-aqua-taskforce-for-mac-os-x-users/ https://istartedsomething.com/20080811/launching-aqua-taskfo... Don’t bother clicking the links in the post, domains are squatted.
- Waterluvian 10mo agoiOS autocomplete for the longest time was just absolutely insane. It would inject the selected suggested option into the middle of a word when I was correcting a spelling error. Really made me feel like I was doing something weird but I swear I was being normal for once.
- godelski 10mo agoMine still does this, especially when it's correcting a word. It happens when your cursor is in the word. But I'm not sure what I hate more: the one I hate the most is when it completes for you and then you get two instances of the word, no space separation or where it corrects the word you just swiped AND the word before it... and then when you press backspace it deletes both words... Btw, I have autocorrect disabled... iOS typing is a fucking nightmare
- halapro 10mo agoThe absolute worst part of OS autocomplete in general is the myriad of apps which some-fn-how break typing wherever an autocompletion is available. I have an autocompletion for "aa" and it's triggered before I press space, meaning it's impossible to type Aaron in these fields. I can only imagine the pain of using "composed" input methods like CJK, etc where every glyph requires multiple keypresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method
- lostlogin 10mo ago> iOS autocomplete for the longest time was just absolutely insane. As well as what you describe, it starts to hate me uncertain words. I have a colleague called An. iOS hates this and changes it. It does it when you are a line away from the word too. It’s painful. I have to type ‘TE’ regularly too, an abbreviation for echo time. If you’re on iOS, try it. I have resorted to typing TEE and then hitting delete to remove a E and then carrying on.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoThis is why I disable autocomplete everywhere. The only exception being shell completion on filenames and executables.
- mparkms 10mo agoThis is why I remapped the shortcut for AI autocomplete to Option-Tab.
- novaleaf 10mo agoFYI: VSCode is actually a much better autocomplete experience than Visual Studio 2026. Go figure.
- suzzer99 10mo agoSometimes I don't mind being the dinosaur still on Sublime Text. It may not have kept up with the times, but at least it's not being enshittified.
- bigstrat2003 10mo agoThese days, "not keeping up with the times" is possibly the biggest feature software can have. The current trend of shoving AI into everything is absolutely awful.
- qingcharles 10mo agoOn a similar note, does anyone actually know how the autocomplete works in Edge? I've still not figured it out on the occasions I have the displeasure to have to use it.
- hypercube33 10mo agoCopilot M365 would rewrite part of a sentence with some random file from SharePoint right before I'd naturally hit enter and unlike any other AI chat you can't remix what you've sent you instead have to start a new chat; God forbid you're a few minutes into said chat
- kazinator 10mo agoIs this supposed to be "get your tab-to-autocomplete shit together"?
- johncoltrane 10mo ago"If you have to press a key for it to happen, then it's not 'auto'."
- ic_fly2 10mo agoMy favourite is always: breakpoint( and then some nonsense arguments. Apparently a good chunk of the code that these LLMs are trained on is python, yet setting a debugging breakpoint still causes difficulties.
- Alifatisk 10mo agoReading all the comments surprises me, have vscode turned this bad? Why? What lowered their quality standard this much?
- hu3 10mo agoit's nothing short of amazing for me. it's very fast. Boots within 1s for me even for large projects. Has a zillion extensions. Some of which you won't see in any other editor, or at least with the same quality. Like the powerful playwright integration for example. LLMs can one-shot most small VSCode extensions when I need some niche functionality. GitHub/Copilot integration is soo good I develop small features by speaking to my computer and even my phone because I can fire agents with voice instructions. Jetbrains IDEs used to be my goto editors and before that neovim. But it's so easy to customise and extend VSCode that I can't see myself going back.
- sitzkrieg 10mo agowhile i prefer visual studio and its working autocomplete, these recent vscode changes made me completely turn off all auto completion and insertions and no longer use any extensions, now it's barely acceptable
- shunia_huang 10mo agoTrue madness for average user here is that they removed Intellisense plugins and force copilot but gives a seriously unusable quota for tab-completion, for non-paid users. I just totally don't get it.
- gnabgib 10mo agoNo they didn't. They removed intellicode - an AI derivative (228 points, 10 days ago, 180 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286383 > IntelliCode is NOT IntelliSense https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290607